iSCSI for games

Michael Dale

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage. Currently I have a 50GB windows partition to play a few games.

Recently I wanted to play the new Wolfenstein game but it requires 40GB of storage!

Unfortunately I just don't have enough storage space on this laptop.

So I have a Synology DS213+ at home with a pair of 3TB drives in Raid 1, this is used for Time Machine backup and backing up my home server.

I decided to see if I could run the game off an iSCSI drive from the DS213+.

I created a standard file based iSCSI Lun (200GB of thin provisioned storage) and then attached it to my Windows 8 bootcamp install.

I then proceeded to to install Wolfenstein directly on to the new drive, I decided to connect my computer via gig ethernet as I was sure that it would be a bottleneck on wifi.

Anyway the game works great (other than the graphics card being a touch slow). In fact based on the cacti graph I think it would work fine on wifi.

After playing about 30 minutes of the game it looks to average about 2-3MB/sec. So am I actually surprised at how low I/O requirements the game needs.

Now I need to be on the local lan to play, but that doesn't matter for me and saving me from spending a bunch of money upgrading the SSD.

I suspect the DS213+ could probably cope with another machine doing a similar thing, the CPU is a bit slow so the new DS415+ would be much better (plus having 4x1GB nics).